Some Grand Lessons

The game map

Several years ago I helped to co-write a Grand Strategy game (imagine a 30-40 player game of Risk). We had written a couple of LARPs in the past and played in several Grand Strategies so we thought it would be quite easy to do this. How wrong we were.

Best Laid Plans
We decided to do a space exploration, combat, and mining game, and right from the start we had several ideas for how to fix problems we had seen in earlier games. The first was speeding up game play, it was not uncommon for some games to end with only three complete game turns being finished because combat and issuing orders took too long. To this end we computerised the combat and game map, which also meant that we could do more 'realistic' stats on the game units with descriptions rather than hard numbers, of course the computer software had numbers for the units but we didn't see why the players had to know these details.

Other features we included were zones, so a player could be on Earth with access to the stock exchange, markets, and government; in space, where they could see the game map, plan in private and issue orders to their fleet; or in transit between the two where they could interact with the somewhat corrupt government intelligence agents. So what went wrong?

Player Like Numbers
Because we had not given numerical stats and a detailed description of how the space combat was worked out*, players were unwilling to commit to a fight and as a result there were no battles the entire game. This was also due to a lack of incentives as players could only destroy other teams mining instillations and couldn't capture them, which made them think that they would be spending resources on damaging another players production capability which they could instead spend on improving their own resource production. The lack of information relating to combat only furthered this problem as players weren't sure what percentage of their fleet would survive the attack, the reality was that more often than not only a few ships on each side would be destroyed and the losing side would retreat before the casualties got too high.

Players Will Exploit Any Loop Hole
As I mentioned there was a stock exchange on earth. This stock exchange had a random element and a player driven element and was designed so that the random element should dominate. The problems started when one team decided to sink all their game cash into just one resource, and noticed that its price rose slightly, they then sold it back and noticed the price dipped slightly. So they went and found the team with the second largest amount of money and they both invested in the single resource, which caused its price to spike, they then sold and the price plummeted, so they then spent the rest of the game playing the stock market. It turns out that their was a level at which the player driven element would dominate, which hadn't shown up during play testing because no one had invested so heavily in just a single resource.

Friend Computer is not Your Friend
The first thing that happened on the night was the discovery that the wall separating the Earth zone and the Space zone was made of some magic material which resulted in the Wi-Fi not working so the head GM who was located on Earth couldn't update the map, which was located in Space. So some furniture was rearranged, ethernet cables were fetched, and the problem was resolved. The next problem came right at the very end, I previously said that there was no combat which isn't entirely true, on the very last turn the Earth fleet engaged a player fleet and as a result the software crashed. During play testing we had run numerous battle simulations, tweaked numbers so that the results agreed with what we expected and we had even run a small combat only version of the game, all without incident. But, on the night the one and only combat crashed, and crashed hard. The head GM (who also happened to have written the code) had to manually work out what orders had and had not been processed before being able to give the final end game positions, as the combat result wouldn't affect the final standing it was ignored.

Players Find a Way to Have Fun
You might think that with all these problems the players would be bored and disappointed, but they still told us that they had had a good time. One team had found fun in a bottle of Vodka (this tends to happen no matter how engaging and well written the game is, as it is run as a social event) while another team had fun by being as devious as possible. The corrupt intelligence agents would sell you information relating to what other teams were up to, show you their orders, or even sell you ships at sub-market prices. One team realised that if they bought information from the agents then there was nothing stopping them from selling this on, better yet why even bother actually buying the information in the first place, the great thing about secrets is that they are secret so no one knows if they are true or not. It was quite a shock when a player came up to me with an envelope of game currency and asked for a full report on Project Pegasus (no such project existed), still I took the cash and told them that I would go and prepare the report. After a quick GM meeting we gave them a report and suddenly a player invented rumour was official, much to the amusement of the team that had started it.

Conclusion
From being involved with this game I learnt a lot about how players think and what they want in a game, and despite the technology issues on the night I still like the idea of automating the game map, and have since done so for a LARP without incident. I just think that in future I will be sure to include numbers for unit stats and a description of how combat works, along with some incentives for fighting.

*Combat was worked worked out with the capital ships launching their fighter and bombers. The fighters would attack the bombers and enemy fighters, then any undamaged bombers would attack the capital ships. Finally the capital ships would fire on each other. Then a moral check was taken, if this was passed another round of combat occurred, otherwise one of the two sides would retreat.